Indiana Bans Safest Second-Term Abortion Method, Because They Just Really Love Life

Oh, Indiana. The state what wrought Vice President Mike Pence and also this guy I met one time who told me I was the first "ethnic white" he'd ever met. It sure is a place! And it is a place that is going to be a very unsafe place to get a second-trimester abortion very soon.

On Wednesday evening, Indiana Governor Eric Holcomb signed two really bad anti-abortion measures into law, both of which will go into effect on July 1. The first, House Enrolled Act 1211, bans dilation and extraction abortions -- the safest abortion method for abortions after 13 weeks, according to the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists.

Wow! That sure seems like a counterintuitive thing for people who claim to love life so much to do! I would think they would think the safest method would be best! you might say, if you are but a naïve babe in the woods. But you would be very, very wrong. Because the pregnant person's life is not what matters here.

Why are they banning this method? Because, like pretty much all surgical procedures, it is easy to make it sound really gross:

House Enrolled Act 1211, which takes effect July 1, prohibits dilation and evacuation abortions, which the law calls "dismemberment abortion," except when a woman otherwise would suffer "substantial and irreversible physical impairment of a major bodily function." [...]

But anti-abortion lawmakers claim the procedure is "barbaric" because it requires a doctor to use forceps, tongs, scissors or similar instruments to remove a fetus from a woman's uterus.

Yes. Pretty much all medical procedures sound extremely gross when explained like that. Are we gonna just start banning all of the surgery now? Oh no, you can't have a heart transplant because EW they use surgical instruments to do that instead of just beaming it into your body ever-so-neatly!

The only real reason to enact this law is to restrict access to abortion. Because the hope is that if they outlaw the safest method of second-trimester abortions, pregnant people will just decide to have the baby instead. They actually want abortions to be less safe so that people will not have them.

Senate Enrolled Act 201, the other act signed into law by Eric Holcomb on Wednesday, expanded the state's "conscience-protection" law, allowing "nurses, pharmacists and physician assistants who are not directly employed by a hospital or health clinic" to opt out of participating in an abortion in some way or another or prescribing abortion medication. In other words, it allows them to not do their jobs and still get paid. Nice!

Perhaps, instead of enacting these stupid laws, people could just not apply for jobs that require them to do things they do not want to do, instead leaving them for others who will actually do the job? There are lots of jobs that one might morally object to doing, but most of us have the sense to not to go into professions that require us to do things that violate our personal beliefs in a very serious way. You don't see vegans working at steakhouses and then conscientiously objecting to selling customers any meat.

Thankfully, the Indiana ACLU is gearing up to fight both of the new laws in court.

The Indiana ACLU already has indicated that it will challenge the measure in court, a fight that the state attorney general's office has signaled it's eager to wage — despite repeatedly losing over the past decade in its attempts to defend Indiana laws restricting abortion.

Of course they're eager. With the makeup of the United States Supreme Court what it is, states like Indiana can't wait to put all of their horrifying anti-abortion laws to the test -- and it's hard to have much confidence that they won't win. And if they do, we here in Illinois are gonna need more of these signs.

Robyn Pennacchia is a brilliant, fabulously talented and visually stunning angel of a human being, who shrugged off what she is pretty sure would have been a Tony Award-winning career in musical theater in order to write about stuff on the internet. Previously, she was a Senior Staff Writer at Death & Taxes, and Assistant Editor at The Frisky (RIP). Currently, she writes for Wonkette, Friendly Atheist, Quartz and other sites. Follow her on Twitter at @RobynElyse

You guys, hi, hello, it is almost the holiday weekend, so we are going to share you a real video posted last night by "Doctor" Sebastian "Don't Call Me A Nazi" Gorka, that hilarious old knucklecuck. We guess now that he had to give up (or gave up voluntarily!) his Fox News contract, he just makes videos for the Twitter. Hoo ... ray?

Anyway, Gorka is super-excited that Donald Trump issued that order last night, giving Bill Barr all kinds of new powers to expose the Deep State for what it is and PROVE once and for all that the gremlins who live inside Trump's diarrhea are correct when they say Hillary ordered the Deep State to do an illegal witch hunt to Trump, yadda yadda yadda, you've seen these people huff paint before, we don't have to type it all.

Here is the video, after which Wonkette will either transcribe it OR we will provide our own dramatic interpretation. Which one will it be? We don't know! Would you be able to tell the difference between the two? We don't know!

We want to say right here at the outset that we hate Julian Assange. Aside from the sexual assault allegations against him, and aside from the fact that he's just a generally stinky and loathsome person who reportedly smeared poop on the walls at the Ecuadorian embassy in London, while reportedly not taking care of his cat, an innocent creature, he acted as Russia's handmaiden during the 2016 election, in order to further Russia's campaign to steal it for Donald Trump. All signs point to his campaign being a success!

So we are justifiably happy when bad things happen to Julian Assange. We are happy his name is shit the world over, and that any reputation WikiLeaks used to have for being on the side of freedom and transparency has been stuffed down the toilet where it belongs. We are happy he looked like such a sad-ass loser when the Ecuadorian embassy finally kicked him out and he was arrested.

And quite frankly, we were OK with the initial charge against him recently unsealed in the Eastern District of Virginia. If you'll remember, he was charged with trying to help Chelsea Manning hack a password into the Defense Department, which is not what journalists do. Journalists do not drive the get-away car for sources. Journalists do not hold their sources' hair back while they're stealing classified intel. Assange is essentially accused of doing all that.

Now, put all that aside. Because -- and this is key -- journalists do publish secrets they are provided by sources. That's First Amendment, chapter and verse, American as fucking apple pie and fast-food-induced diabetes. And that is what much of the superseding indictment of Assange unsealed yesterday was about. (And nope, it wasn't about anything regarding Assange's ratfucking the 2016 election or Hillary's emails. Why would the Trump Justice Department prosecute anything about that? It's all about the older Chelsea Manning stuff, the stuff the Obama Justice Department considered charging Assange with, but ultimately declined, because of that little thing called the First Amendment.)